News

Unidentified militiamen shot dead an electoral official on Monday when they attacked a voter registration centre in Fataki, a town in the northeastern district of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Independent Electoral Commission Chairman Apollinaire Malu Malu said.

On 22 July 2005, the international medical relief agency, Médecins Sans Frontiéres (MSF), announced that it was halting all medical and humanitarian aid to an estimated 100,000 people, almost half of the population displaced by civil unrest in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo district of Ituri.

Lights may blaze again soon in parts Kalemie town, eastern Congo, which have been deprived of electricity for the past 13 years, the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) reported on Wednesday.

Voter registration was extended for an additional week on Sunday in the Democratic Republic of Congo provinces of Orientale and Bas-Congo due to transport and security difficulties, the chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, Appollinaire Malu Malu, said.

A three-man team of doctors is due in a remote diamond mining area of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday to try to identify a respiratory disease that has, so far, killed 23 miners and infected 997 others; the Maniema provincial medical inspector, Dr Kasogo Mulamba, told IRIN.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tanzania have agreed at a meeting to repatriate 152,000 Congolese refugees to South Kivu Province in September, despite concerns by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, about the security and human rights conditions there.

The European Commission has decided to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) four million euros to support its programmes protecting people displaced by armed conflicts, deprived of their freedom and separated from their relatives in three central African nations as well as in several nations in Asia, the EU Information Office announced on Monday.

Some 40 combatants and over 100 civilians who had fled into western Uganda from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) last week have returned to their country, a Ugandan military spokesman said on Tuesday.